Never ask a wireless engineer working on the NYC subway system “What can go wrong?” Flooding, ice, brake dust, and power outages relentlessly attack the network components. Rats — many, many rats — can eat power and fiber optic cables and bring down the whole system. Humans are no different, as their curiosity or malice strikes a blow against wireless hardware… Read More

The nation state has survived wars, plagues, and upheaval, but it won’t survive digital nomads, not if people like Karoli Hindriks have something to say about it. Hindriks is the founder of Jobbatical, a platform that allows digital nomads to find work in other countries and helps with the logistics of getting there.
The company also embodies a new world of highly-skilled, global… Read More

French startup Sqreen recently launched a Security Hub with dozens of plugins to put you in control of the security of your web app. In many ways, it feels like enabling tasks on popular automation service IFTTT.
Sqreen participated in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield and Y Combinator’s current batch. The vision of the product hasn’t changed. Sqreen lets you protect your… Read More

Chances are you’ve heard of Google. You’re likely a contributor to one of the 3.5 billion search queries the website processes daily. But unless you’re a venture capitalist, an entrepreneur or a slightly obsessive tech journalist, you may not know that Google, or, more properly, Alphabet, is also invests in startups. And, like most of what Google does, Alphabet invests… Read More

They say the eyes are the windows to the soul, but physiologically speaking, they’re windows to the brain. RightEye is a startup that looks through that window to detect common but often subtle vision issues resulting from concussions and other brain troubles. Its quick, portable eye-tracking station can tell in minutes whether you should see a doctor — or look into becoming a pro… Read More

The Gillmor Gang — Keith Teare, Esteban Kolsky, Denis Pombriant, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, February 16, 2018. The Gang catches its breath as cryptocurrency crashes and rebounds, Facebook attacks its stream or does it, while publishers and their aggregators cozy up to a wave of bundling
@stevegillmor, ekolsky, @DenisPombriant
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor… Read More

When black employee resource groups from a variety of tech companies come together, black magic happens. More specifically, black excellence happens.
The Coalition of Black Excellence Week, spearheaded by Uber Litigation Counsel Angela Johnson in collaboration with black ERGs from over 40 tech companies like Facebook, Google, eBay, Lyft and Microsoft, kicks off this Monday in the San Francisco… Read More

At the core of Facebook’s “well-being” problem is that its business is directly coupled with total time spent on its apps. The more hours you pass on the social network, the more ads you see and click, the more money it earns. That puts its plan to make using Facebook healthier at odds with its finances, restricting how far it’s willing to go to protect us from the harms… Read More

Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos apologized for spam texts that were incorrectly sent to users who had activated two-factor authentication. The company is working on a fix, and you won’t receive non-security-related text messages if you never signed up for those notifications.
Facebook says it was a bug. But calling it a bug is a bit too easy — it’s a feature that… Read More

It looks like Telegram’s billion-dollar ICO has reached its first milestone after the chat app company raised an initial $850 million, according to a filing.
A document submitted to the SEC earlier this week states that the money was raised “for the development of the TON Blockchain, the development and maintenance of Telegram Messenger and the other purposes.” The security… Read More

Yesterday, we wrote that Coinbase customers were being charged multiple times for past transactions.
While some speculated that the erroneous withdraws were down to a Coinbase engineering issue, Coinbase issued a statement saying it wasn’t liable for the duplicate charges. The blame, instead, rested with Visa for the way it handled a migration of merchant categories for… Read More

A mapping startup based in Missoula, Mont., which allows users to download sophisticated offline topographic maps outlining public and private lands and a number of other features geared towards hunting, fishing and camping, has pulled in its first major outside funding.
onXmaps has closed a $20.3 million Series A round led by Summit Partners. Bessemer Venture Partners, Millennium… Read More

Twilio’s Engagement Cloud, its suite of products for building new customer experiences, is about to get a new feature, TechCrunch has learned. The company plans on launching the beta of a full contact center solution for businesses at the Enterprise Connect conference in March, according to a tip we received this afternoon. When reached for confirmation, Twilio had no comment. Read More

On Friday, Twitter announced that it would abandon its lesser-loved Mac app, directing users to Twitter.com instead. The company declared that it will refocus its efforts on “a great Twitter experience that’s consistent across platforms” rather than continuing development for Twitter for Mac, a message that doesn’t sound great for TweetDeck lovers. Read More

Surprise! Assorted jerks on the internet have weaponized the Unicode-based bug we reported yesterday to insta-crash apps running on an iPhone or a Mac. The result is somewhere between the old Alt + F4 trick and a script kiddie stunt, and it ranges from being annoying to rendering a device unusable, depending on the tenacity of the troll. Read More

A federal body overseeing labor disputes advised the dismissal of Jeremy Damore’s claim that Google fired him unjustly for his controversial memo regarding inclusion and diversity programs at the company. Citing similar precedents, the NLRB counsel deemed parts of the memo “so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive” as to shed their status as protected speech in the workplace. Read More

A recent ruling by a New York federal judge could have significant implications for how copyright laws are enforced. The ruling was made in a case where Justin Goldman accused publications including Breitbart, Time, Yahoo, Vox Media and the Boston Globe of violating his copyright by embedding into their stories tweets with his photo of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Read More

Marvel’s Black Panther officially opens today, but TechCrunch’s Darrell Etherington and Anthony Ha have seen it already.
Darrell and Anthony are both comic book nerds, and the latest episode of the Original Content podcast includes plenty of discussion about how the latest movie fits into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But Black Panther isn’t just for hardcore comic geeks, so… Read More

Cloudflare has a unique way of protecting a huge portion of the world’s internet. They call it their Wall of Entropy; a wall lined with lava lamps that are being filmed with a camera. That data is then converted to numbers jumbled up with a couple other sources of randomness in other parts of the world, like a Geiger counter and a chaotic pendulum, and is then fed into an algorithm with… Read More

Oracle announced yesterday that it intends to acquire Zenedge, a 4-year old hybrid security startup. They didn’t reveal a purchase price.
With Zenedge, Oracle gets a security service to add it to its growing cloud play. In this case, the company has products to protect customers whether in the cloud, on-prem or across hybrid environments.
The company offers a range of services from… Read More